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Place Symbolism and Land Politics in Beowulf.', Cultural Geographies., 16 (4)

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Place Symbolism and Land Politics in Beowulf.', Cultural Geographies., 16 (4) Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 20 May 2010 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Elden, S. (2009) 'Place symbolism and land politics in Beowulf.', Cultural geographies., 16 (4). pp. 447-463. Further information on publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1474474009340087 Publisher's copyright statement: The nal denitive version of this article has been published in the Journal Cultural Geographies, 16/4 2009 c SAGE Publications Ltd by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Cultural Geographies page: http://cgj.sagepub.com/ on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk Place Symbolism and Land Politics in Beowulf Abstract This essay provides a reading of the Old English poem Beowulf, with a focus on its symbolic and political geographies. The key question is the role of place or site in the poem in general terms, and the more specific issue of land. The essay first analyses three significant sites in the narrative—the locations of the battles between Beowulf and Grendel, Grendel‘s mother and the dragon. Each of these places—the hall, the mere, and the burial-mound—are shot through with powerful emotive, elemental, symbolic and material geographies. Analysis then moves to the politics of land, a resource which is gifted, distributed, disputed and fought over. While part of a larger project which seeks to look at the conceptual and historical relation between land, terrain and territory, this essay offers a more modest focused study of a single text from a particular period. Land ▪ Place ▪ Elements ▪ Old English Literature Introduction The Old English poem Beowulf has been receiving a great deal of popular attention in recent years.1 Long the scourge of English undergraduates, the recent cinematic adaptations, notably the 2007 version directed by Robert Zemeckis and authored by Neil Gaiman, have brought the story to a whole new audience.2 If that film, and other adaptations, take great licence with the story, the more literary merits have also been discussed in the wake of Seamus Heaney‘s verse translation of 1999.3 Whatever the problems of the films in terms of the story, or Heaney‘s supposed errors of, or interpretations in place of, 1 translation,4 they have undoubtedly raised the profile of a difficult and problematic text. The concern here is with what Beowulf can tell us of the politics of land and the symbolism of place.5 This focus is one that has a solid textual basis and historical purpose. The last book of Nicholas Howe, a renowned medievalist, is entitled Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England and bears the subtitle Essays in Cultural Geography.6 In this book, Howe makes the claim that ―Beowulf is profoundly a work about place‖.7 Although Howe makes a number of suggestions about how that might be the case, the analysis is of some very particular passages, rather than the poem as a whole. Indeed, while his claim concerns place in general terms, the explicit analysis, as will be discussed later, is of the notion of eþel, homeland. Here, in distinction, the focus is not just on places as sites, but on their political aspects, the question of land.8 While there have been a number of important monographs and edited collections looking at geography and space generally in the middle ages in recent years,9 with some exceptions this is not a period that has received much attention from geographers.10 In taking Beowulf as the focus here the interest is thus as much with the indications of the text as with its literary merits. In a pioneering piece of scholarship in 1936 Tolkien made a convincing argument that ―so far from being a poem so poor that only its accidental historical interest can still recommend it, Beowulf is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content‖.11 While this may be true, the text does offer some very valuable insights into the particular politics of land that can be found in the period of the early Middle Ages, sometimes known as the Dark Ages. Caution is of course necessary, for as Earl suggests: 2 Though the world is not a text, Beowulf certainly is. It is only a map and not the world itself. The most fundamental error in literary criticism is to mistake the map for the territory—in this case, Beowulf for the world of Germania, Scandinavia, or Anglo- Saxon England.12 Nonetheless, even he suggests that ―the best evidence we have for understanding early Germanic society is Beowulf itself, but its vision is idealized, archaic, anachronistic, and only partial‖.13 For Girvan the assessment is even more positive: ―it has been set alongside Tacitus as witness of the Germanic period, and it is not surprising for it is the most important Germanic document in extent and character which we possess‖.14 It is one of the earliest surviving works of English literature, or indeed in any northern European vernacular language. The reading offered here tries to steer a way through these ambiguities. It does not try to suggest that lessons from Beowulf can tell us anything particularly concrete about those places that are mentioned in the text. Many editions of Beowulf have a map of its geography at the beginning, showing the Geats in what is today southern Sweden, the Swedes and the Heathoreams to the North, and the Danes in the Zealand area of modern Denmark. The Old English Gēat is often taken to be the equivalent of the modern Swedish Göt, that is the region of Götaland, and the historical tribe of the Götar, who lived in that region.15 Various other tribes are loosely distributed across northern Germany, Poland, and the low countries, and the modern village of Lejre, near Roskilde, is often given as the location of Heorot.16 While some of this work is valuable, an attempt to find a historical basis for the sites of the events is not the purpose of this essay.17 Nor does it seek to generalise from what insights there are in the text that can be tied to archaeological evidence.18 Rather, the interest is in the particularly 3 symbolic and exchange geographies implied and presented in the poem itself, which are themselves intensely material. In this sense it is closer to one of Tolkien‘s other insights: The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends: who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography.19 Thus the focus here is on the text itself; its story, history and geography. A brief summary of the original story is in order, before the analysis begins, not least because of the changes made in recent better-known adaptations. A great mead- hall has been built named Heorot, where Hrothgar rules the Danes. The hall is attacked by the monster Grendel, a descent of the race of Cain. Beowulf of the Geats travels to Heorot and kills the monster with his bare hands. The next night the monster‘s mother seeks vengeance; Beowulf pursues her to her lair, and slays her too. Beowulf returns home, and in time becomes King of the Geats. Some fifty years later, Beowulf‘s people are attacked by a dragon. Beowulf meets the dragon in combat, and though he kills it, dies in the battle. Without his protection the Geats are overrun by the Swedes from the north and tribes from the south. The reading here proceeds through a number of stages. The text indicates three set-piece battles—with Grendel, his mother, and the dragon; but rather less noted are the particular sites at which these take place—the hall, the mere, and the burial-mound. Following readings of these three sites, two more general themes are discussed: gifts of land and conflict over it. Generally then this reading offers something different from analyses which focus on themes such as dating or its relation to Christianity, or those that follow the poet‘s lead and 4 stress characterisation and narrative. For Orchard, ―the sheer number and variety of characters depicted by the Beowulf-poet, when compared with his comparative disinterest in the specifics of place, signals his overarching concern for individuals and their individual perspectives‖.20 In distinction here, and in the company of those referenced in the notes, a range of symbolic and political senses of land are shown to saturate the narrative. The Hall Hrothgar‘s hall is a centrepiece of his realm, a great mead-hall, a place of celebration. The poet describes this as ―a house greater than men on earth ever had heard of‖ (70-1).
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